


The Wood Beyond

by Anna S (eliade)



Series: The Woods series [3]
Category: The Sentinel
Genre: M/M, Other: See Story Notes, Post-Series
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-06-08
Updated: 2013-06-08
Packaged: 2017-12-13 19:40:32
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 14,633
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/828085
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/eliade/pseuds/Anna%20S
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Third story in The Woods series.  Originally published in October, 2001</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Wood Beyond

**The Wood Beyond**  
 

_When Blair managed to open his eyes he was looking down at a man's unmoving body, which lay sprawled face-up on the surface of a bed. A bedspread lay in disarray beneath him, and the man's sweatpants had been drawn down and left in a twist around his ankles, which were taped together. Electrical cord bound his hands above his head, and a second cord affixed his wrists to the headboard. The room lacked a roof, so Blair could see down into it as if it were an open box. He could see other rooms too, an entire nest of brightly lit boxes closed off from the dark leafy woods. A row of men sat in one room against a wall; others moved freely. They were tiny forms from his vantage point, mice in a maze. When Blair got a sense of the distance involved, he realized he was hovering above his own empty body, and fell back into its cradle with jarring force._

_He lay there, shocked halfway back to awareness. Part of him recognized the real dimensions of the cabin bedroom, could feel the lined fabric beneath his skin and the increasingly stuffy air. Another part of him drifted, and had trouble recollecting what quest had brought him here to lie on this rock, which was placed in the same spot where the cabin had stood a thousand years in the past, or would stand a thousand years in the future. Whatever the time, the cabin was gone now, and all his friends were gone too. He was alone. He could see the forest through the walls of the cabin, the creek in the dead of night, could even see places he hadn't explored, not as he might imagine them, but as they existed: the unique fractals of tree branches, individual stones married to their rings of dirt, the thick fall of leaves on the ground in patterns he would recognize again in an instant. The moon hung above him, covering the ceiling lamp in the bedroom like two stacked dimes._

_His mouth tasted of sourness and of semen; his tongue was dry but sticky. His body had started to ache in unfamiliar places. As disturbing as any violation was his sense of seeing both what was and wasn't there. The bright walls of the cabin hung like translucent curtains in the dark forest. Why hadn't he seen this before? Maybe he was dead. Maybe he would die again and again until he got it right._

_"Ai ai ai," he whispered. The staccato chant was relaxing. "Ai ai ai ai." He continued whispering and rocked his head back and forth in a way that felt comforting. He was awaiting his next trial, waiting for the spirits to return. The spirits, a goat and a grizzly, rose directly from the ground, coming and going about their business. They wore the bodies and faces of his captors, but their eyes glinted; these were the souls of the dead, determined to impart their teachings. More spirits gathered around to watch, hundreds. The white globe hanging above him created halos around the dark, surrounding faces. The spirits spoke in a language Blair didn't know, like English but inverted, with scrambled meanings that couldn't be grasped._

_The man with the beard cut the tape on his ankles, held his legs apart, pushed inside. "Ah yeah, squirm like that, punk," he said, digging deep, and those words were so clear they appeared burned onto the air between them. Blair clenched his teeth and his eyes shut, twisted his head on the pillow, gasping finally when he could not hold it in. That pain, the scrape of the man's zipper against his balls, these were the fangs of a snake burrowing its way inside. He tried to kick, but the man pushed heavily forward, forcing his legs down, still thrusting. Blair feared that the snake would keep sliding in deeper and never come out. And then it did slide in further and make its way, loose, into his depths. As it twisted there, one of the spirits thrust a burning spear through his belly until it broke out the small of his back. The snake swallowed his organs until he was hollow then regurgitated them. Its progress was slow and thorough, an as it moved it spawned others of its kind until his belly swam with snakes, until he filled up with them, felt them curling behind his eyes, saw them._

_I'm dead, Blair thought, heaving with wild agony. The sense of being immured in his own rotting flesh tore a scream from his throat. He shook and sobbed, his scream dying into hoarse, disregarded pleas. The spirits had devised this ritual; it couldn't be evaded. The snakes were real, the men heaving inside him were real, and the overlapping of reality and reality doubled the maddening weight of the world._

_Phantom time passed, what might have been a day and a night; and then another day and night. Solitude and waiting. Then Blair, exhausted and worn, saw that the white globe above was not the moon or a ceiling lamp but the surface of the earth itself, and that he was looking up at it from the bottom of a pit. He began to cry. He would never be able to crawl up out of a hole so deep and smooth. He tried to rise from his body, but could not; he was wedded to it heavily like a stone to its bed._

_"Ai ah ya, ah ai yah," he murmured through his tears. They trailed rivulets of salt into his mouth. The rhythm lulled him toward acceptance. In time even this simple chant seemed too complicated, and he settled into a simpler monosyllabic song, ya ya ya ya ya ya ya, whose permutations of pitch and cadence were endless._

_On the third day the spirits returned to him. One wore a hat and a vest and carried a shard of clay in his hand that he turned and caressed. Both smoked cigars. They walked on their hind legs, then dropped to all fours and came to him as animals with dark eyes._

_"No," Blair said suddenly. He rolled his head from side to side, his skull unwieldy and weighted, hair plastered to his skin in heated tendrils. He was in a ring of fire in the middle of the forest. He'd been here before and he saw people he recognized, faces whitened with ash, Sayakh, Tayan, Kaeti. They squatted around the edge of the fire, moaning and swaying like the trees swayed above. He saw stars and bats wheeling overhead. He tried to move his hands, but his wrists were held fast. The animal guides crouched over him in their borrowed human apparel. It was time, six thousand miles away, a thousand years adrift, but also here now. He had to be ready._

_Hands held him down with great strength and claws began rending him. He grew drunk on pain. They cut open his head with the shard, washed his brains, giving him a clean mind with which to divine the mysteries of evil spirits; they stuck barbed hooks onto his fingers to enable him to hold souls fast; they cleansed his eyes with blood so that he could see the sickness within; and they cut out his heart and replaced it with a crystal of quartz, incising him with sympathy and power. On his skin was carved and burned the secret language of spirits. Blair shook and moaned and screamed as the power had its way with him._

_When the last word was marked down, he broke free of his flesh and flew up toward the light. The pit had vomited him forth, and he found himself at the top of the world, on a mountain that overlooked the wood beyond the world. A wolf lolled by his side, a panther watched him from the low limbs of a tree, and an otter sat at his feet, waiting to help him across the river in the sky._

_Blair flung himself at the sky, and fell again._

*****

"Blair, wake up, easy--wake up, Chief, come on."

Hands patted his face lightly. Big, warm hands that smelled of chives and soap. Blair sucked in a breath, stuttered out a few incoherent words, and opened his eyes to see Jim looking down at him. Jim's concern was palpable. Eyes clear blue, their orbits rigid with tension and maybe fear. Blair knew he'd been dreaming, but the dream had already drifted out of range and memory.

"There you go," Jim said, helping him shift to sit against the pillows. He'd been up, apparently; he wore his robe. His touch was gentling, and Blair felt the dream loosen its grip. "Easy, baby," he said when Blair's head lightly thunked one of the posts behind him. Blair wasn't yet used to being the recipient of Jim's soft talk, but he kind of liked it, while wondering if Jim had spoken that way to women when intimate, or if this was something entirely new. It seemed to come easily to him, the big mushball.

Jim caught him smiling and some of the lines in his face relaxed. "You awake now?"

"Yeah. Just another dream. Sorry about the yelling."

"You weren't yelling."

"Oh." Jim must have been monitoring him closely. Heart rate, respiration. He did this regularly enough that it was no big surprise. It could be a little freaky, though, to be reminded of it. "Was I grunting?"

Jim almost smiled, but in his eyes was a contrariety, as if he were thinking about the subject of Blair's dreams. "Nope. No grunting. You were running in your sleep." He paused and his throat moved as he swallowed. "Chasing rabbits," he added in a light tone, a few beats later.

"How'd you know?" Blair grinned, wanting to dispel Jim's shadows. "I almost caught this big guy--" Blair held out his hands. "--ye long. Pure white. Running fast as butter."

"Carrying a pocket watch?"

"Man, you're uncanny."

Jim took one of his hands and turned it over, rubbed the pulse point before allowing their fingers to curl together. "Last night was--" He paused, and Blair's breath paused in synch. "Everything I'd hoped." His eyes were downcast with shyness and his voice carried a soft honesty that sent chills of pleasure through Blair.

Moved, he couldn't speak for a moment. "For me too." He felt his words were less true than Jim's, but it couldn't be helped. He meant them to be true at heart, and that would have to be enough, because everything he'd hoped six weeks ago had been so much more.

Looking up, Jim searched his face. "You don't have to say what comes easiest because you think I want to hear it. I can take. . .whatever you give."

He was being patient and generous, which robbed his words of any sting, and Blair wasn't sure he could bear it. He smiled, dredging up naughty pretense. "I'll remember that when the time comes."

Jim, eventually humored, went back down to make breakfast. After a few minutes, Blair smelled the waft of omelets rising from the kitchen. He rolled over on his belly and settled his chin on the pillow. If he turned his head, he could almost see Jim at the island; even as he watched, a hand slid into view, grabbing the salt shaker from the back of the range. Probably to salt his share of the eggs. Sneaky bastard. He wouldn't do it at the table while Blair was watching, oh no.

"I saw that," Blair murmured. There was a small pause in pan-rattling below, then ostentatious throat clearing. He smiled sidelong into the pillow. He was trying not to think of his dream. Most of his dreams were about the weekend he'd been raped; his mind labored at the significance of events even as he slept, and the labors left him tired when he woke.

The weekend loomed ahead, and he wondered what he'd do with it, what Jim and he would do together. Simple things, probably. Laundry and light cleaning. Watch some TV. Plan and make dinners. Ordinary stuff, good stuff. For Jim, he treaded water on weekends. During the week, he could stop trying so hard and sink down into the pursuit of. . .whatever he was pursuing. Rabbits. Understanding.

He hadn't adjusted yet to the interrupted rhythms of his life. It had taken him four weeks to notice that Jim's schedule had changed, that he never worked evenings or nights any longer, that he always had weekends off. Some days he didn't notice the alternation of light to dusk. But then he hadn't been getting out of the loft much. So far there had been few reasons to leave. Thursday he'd have one. Thursday he'd be going to the William Magill Clinic for an HIV test. The blood of his rapists hadn't tested positive, but they'd been half a day dead by the time it was drawn. The odds were in his favor. But he had no way to be sure. Donald Waith, who'd reeked of poison, had given him gonorrhea. That had been quickly diagnosed and cured while Blair was still in the hospital, but it made him dread to learn what else might have been passed on.

He'd developed no symptoms of an infection, and Jim had not altered his calm watchfulness as time passed; Jim, who always knew when he had a fever or when his scent changed with signs of illness.

Lying wrapped in Jim's sheets he thought about the possibility of being infected, what it would mean. His stomach flipped over and his heart rate sped up, fueled by anxiety.

"Breakfast is just about ready," Jim called up, ever vigilant.

Blair pulled on some of Jim's clothes then went down and ate breakfast with him, sharing the newspaper and shortening the pot of coffee over the course of an hour. They didn't talk much, but everything was still new enough between them that it tickled Blair to look up and see Jim sitting across from him in his robe with his morning hair and absorption in the sports scores, as handsome a husband as any guy could want. The loft was filled with an expansive sunshine that lay bittersweetly over everything. To think that here was Jim, friend and blessed protector and now lover, taking the dips and drops of his life in stride, but cursed. Everything that came to Jim was doomed or flawed, as Blair might be now. He deserved better.

Jim looked up from the paper, inspecting him. Sensing him. "What do you want to do today?"

Call my mother, Blair thought. Be a shaman. Learn that I don't have AIDS. Sleep. Figure out what to do with my crappy life. Go back a year and changed everything. Do everything right this time. Do something, do anything, right.

"No plans," he said.

Jim had plans. Jim was the master of making plans. Plans and planters. He wanted to go to the hardware store, pick up widgets and gadgets and whatever to rig the pole by the fireplace, like he'd talked about the night before. He also planned to install some sort of lighting arrangement on the brick wall, for full-spectrum bulbs. In truth Blair didn't actually recall their conversation from a summer ago, but he had the impression that by "planters" Jim meant hanging pots, maybe with ferns, which would be nice.

It wasn't obvious whether Jim wanted him to come along to the hardware store. He extended the invitation, but Blair thought he might want to make the trip alone, have some time to himself, so he bowed out and, after Jim left, futzed around the apartment, cleaning and straightening in a haphazard way to make up for a week's worth of nesting. It was kind of incredible that Jim had said nothing about the stacks of books on the coffee table, the sweater over the couch back, the lightly crusted tea mug that had been sitting by the end of the couch for four days, and--was that a sock ball under the TV set? But, not so incredible really. Blair knew that he was being indulged. Sometimes he minded. More often he just couldn't bring himself to.

When he'd made noticeable inroads into the loft's disarray, he ceased his efforts. Dust floated through the sunny air. He stood in the middle of the floor, hands by his sides, and stared off into space. Unsure what to do with himself next. Laundry. Read a book. Write in his journal. Knees shaky, he lowered himself to the floor and sat there and stared at the floor and sunlight for a while. He knew he had, in clinical terms, posttraumatic stress disorder. They'd told him so, told Jim. With it came and went a sense of detachment he couldn't regulate. At times he just floated off. Small as dust but infinitely heavier. But he found the detachment compelling. Almost he could believe he'd achieved something by violent circumstance that he'd been trying for years to achieve through meditation. He didn't care about clinical diagnoses. The emptiness and the sunlight held him fast.

He was still sitting there, sedately blank, when he heard Jim at the door. He roused himself as Jim's key fidgeted the lock, placing both hands on the floor and forcing his body slowly upright. And Jim came in and greeted him and dumped his bags on the table, showed off and described what he'd bought, got some water from the fridge, came over and kissed him on the temple. All the while he talked, and all the while Blair answered, but he was still caught up in the hypnotic allure of detachment, a kind of conscious zone. He knew, when Jim finally began hooking sharp glances his way, that his remoteness had a physical corollary. It was hard to move. Reduced psychomotor activity. He thought about the phenomenon in so many words, assigning it a label, before trying to shake free for Jim's sake.

"I'm going to be watching you," he said to Jim. The words came out strangely flattened of tone and meaning, as if rendered by an alien translator. "I'm going to be sitting here on the couch and reading. I'll be the observer."

Jim nodded, obviously going for normalcy. "Sounds good, Chief."

The afternoon passed in a show of companionship, Jim working on his project and periodically starting a new CD, Blair lying on the couch with his battered copy of _Shamanism_ , trying to divine relevance from the dry words, and to figure out how he'd take the next step from text to practice, theory to life. Now and then he looked up from its dryness and his own dry interior to watch Jim work, the beautiful, methodical way he measured and stretched and proceeded from point to point. Everything about him was admirable and evoked love, and slowly Blair returned from his isolation and reinhabited the wan, sore happiness he'd become accustomed to, which ached like a bone broken and reset.

At some point he went to the kitchen to make himself a sandwich, and Jim, alerted to food, said from the corner of the living room, "Late lunch?"

"Yeah. Just cheese and sprouts and stuff. You want one?"

Jim came over to stand within inches, sniffed and considered the fixings. "Maybe with some ham."

"If you must."

Jim kissed his ear, and they made sandwiches and ate at the table, perching on chairs tilted out of alignment so they could face each other across one corner, feet touching left to right, Blair's socked foot to Jim's leather-shod one.

The older man's eyes held a bright glow and focus on him even while he chewed hungrily, and it made Blair grin goofily, which Jim answered in kind, and by the end of their sandwiches Blair's foot was on top of Jim's, kneading his laces. They went upstairs afterwards and took off their clothes and Jim rubbed off against him, slowly, with hitching gasps of pleasure, and then bent to apply unskilled but amazing licks to his cock.

"You got a haircut," Blair noticed, stroking his head. Cut hairs prickled against his hands.

"Uh huh," Jim murmured, lapping at him.

"You know I like that military look on you. Buff. . .shorn. . .determined."

Jim, buff, shorn, determined, sighted up at him with a glint in his eyes. "Good."

"You like the way I look?"

Jim's gaze widened and affixed his without blinking. "Oh, I--I think so," he said, drawing his reply out as if he'd been asked how many cents to a nickel and didn't trust his calculations. Blair grinned and rubbed his head aggressively. Jim's eyelids slid down a notch. "You look great," he said.

"But not in a military way."

"No," Jim agreed. He kissed Blair's thigh. "The hippies have taken over the base." Blair startled himself by giggling, except that he didn't giggle; no way, man. "You look good, real good," Jim went on dreamily, his breath curling around Blair's cock. "And taste. . ."

"Taste," Blair repeated with equal dreaminess.

". . .real good."

Blair let himself be led back toward the brink of completion by Jim's satisfying mouth. He found it weird, and very hot, to find himself sprawled under a guy who'd been his friend for years and was now intently going down on him. Only once did an image flash in his mind of what it would have been like for Jim if he'd been forced to do the things Blair had done; he panicked and lost a little juice at that. It took a while to recover, but Jim's impassioned encouragement didn't flag and soon Blair was achingly hard again and throbbing against the insistent pressure of Jim's tongue.

"Stop, no," he breathed as he neared release, pushing Jim's mouth off with difficulty. "Like this," he said, and brought Jim's hand to his cock. Jim relocated so they lay face to face, and finished him off with sweet jerking movements, doing that incredible thing with his thumb again that made Blair cry out even more sharply this time.

Afterwards, Blair dozed like a cosseted cat against Jim, but never fell fully asleep, and sighed with regret when Jim slipped out of bed later and went back downstairs to his fiddling. After a time he followed and padded around the loft, sated but restless. Drew books at random from their shelves and put them back unopened. Rearranged knick-knacks and thought about feng shui. Went into his old room, kicking his way through the opened storage boxes and their scattered contents. He could feel Jim listening from the far side of the loft. Lost, he sat at his desk, fired up his computer, and downloaded his e-mail, but then scrolled through it with no real interest. Messages from his anthro lists, from an ex-student in Burma, from those few wayward friends he still retained; and a scattering of messages from the male rape survivors list that a counselor at the hospital had recommended.

He forced himself to open one of these e-mails. It was a long message from someone named Chris, describing his experience with the police after being assaulted by a group of men outside a bar. Blair read through it stoically, face tight, stomach fluttering, until he reached the line, _they stood around and looked at me like I was the dirtiest faggot they'd ever seen outside a morgue_ , and then he broke and cried with rough, miserable sobs. He pushed his laptop across the desk until it hit the wall, and bent his head.

"Blair." Jim was in the doorway.

"Go away," he said, wet face pressed into his arms. "Please, Jim."

Jim went.

*****

When he came out of his old room an hour or so later, Jim was malingering in the kitchen, shoulders tense, with a cupboard's worth of canned goods spread out on one counter. He was wiping dust off the cans. If Blair hadn't been so drained and touched, he would have mocked him at length. Instead, he walked around the counter--and Jim was turning, putting down a can, reaching for him--and into Jim's arms. Jim enveloped his shoulders and stroked between his shoulder blades, up along the back of his neck. He could hug. Blair wondered sometimes where he'd learned this powerful gift of touch; not, he suspected, from other Ellisons.

Head resting against Jim's chest, eyelids swollen, he stared at the cans. "You're washing cans," he said, having a half-hearted go.

"Yeah. Dusty."

"There's maybe a nanometer of dust on the top of those cans."

"I'm pretty sure it's two nanometers."

"Mmm. How're the planters coming?"

"Done. I've just got to install the lights. I've got some plants down in the truck. Thought I'd wait until everything was ready then bring them up."

He drew his head back and gazed up at Jim. Sometimes he didn't know what to say in the face of Jim's kindness, or to his literal face in which handsomeness disguised such beauty that Blair would have thrown himself on a knife in sacrifice to it. Sometimes there were moments when he looked at Jim and recognized that he'd wanted this man for as long as memory stretched, wanted these elements, as starkly as a child wants snowfall or a father. He'd just been waiting, like a boy standing at a fence in twilight surrounded by snow and emptiness and silence, looking at a road down which no one ever came.

"I'll help you bring them up. When you're ready," Blair said.

A smile moved behind Jim's face. Acknowledgment. They disengaged gently, and he began to turn back to the cans.

"No. Go on. I'll put these away." Blair waved him off. He put a can back up into the cupboard. "Do you want them by alphabetical order or label color?" he jabbed dryly.

"That's actually not a bad idea," Jim tossed off, heading back to his work.

"Jim, I'm laying down the law, and the law is natural selection. Whatever comes to hand first is what goes in first. Because I do not want you to be the man who twenty years from now makes me alphabetize our kitchen."

There was a contented grunt from the far wall, and Blair thought, _twenty years_ , and marveled at the trend of his own thoughts. Counter cleared, he made himself tea with unhurried care.

He may not have all the time in the world, but he had this slow, spreading afternoon.

*****

Carolyn stepped out of the elevator, thinking that she probably should have called ahead. Jim had always disliked unexpected visits, and she didn't really have any idea how mobile or ready for company Blair was. But if she'd called, Jim would probably have brushed her off in that way of his.

Damn Simon anyway for making her look like a rude and thoughtless bitch--or, if she admitted the galling reality, for merely helping her--but that was enough, and damn him for not saying word one about being held _hostage_ , which it might have occurred to anyone else with a dab of brain in their head to mention, except for macho cops, oh no, who liked to pretend that these things were just par for the course, part of the job, like Indiana Jones in there, always prepared to rappel off a roof and crash through a window, but god forbid you should book concert tickets at the last minute.

She shifted her casserole dish and her purse, and fretted as she approached the door to 307. It had never stopped being odd, coming back like this, to a place to which she'd once owned the keys. Time was when she'd be approaching the door and reaching for them, readying to walk in to the antiseptic neatness of the loft and her life with Jim.

This time he opened the door moments after her knock, not even giving her the standard once-over, but looking as if he'd expected her, if not particularly pleased about it. He stood in the gap of the door, one hand up on its edge, the other on the frame, allowing it open no wider than his body. He looked good today, casual--tee-shirt, sweats, bare feet.

"Carolyn." His voice was mild, but she heard the wariness in it, because she knew what to listen for, then his gaze dropped to the casserole dish and went blank, as if he were processing the implication of the gift. Always the cop.

"Hello, Jim." She took a deep breath. "I hope you don't mind that I stopped by. I--I wanted to apologize about last night. I guess I was in bitchy ex-wife mode. And," she lowered her voice by instinct, "Simon hadn't told me about what happened. I just found out. After you left."

"Really," Jim said, staring at her with surface calm, the muscle in his cheek jumping once. "What did he tell you?"

She raised a brow, thrown off stride. "What do you think?" Her laugh was abrupt, exasperated. "You were all held hostage, Blair was hurt--did you think I'd have been so catty if I'd known? I feel like a heel, Jimmy. I wish you'd have said something, anything. Give the clue bell a little ring, and I'd have followed. Subtle hints. Casual references. Secret code." She prodded at him with the words, trying to dig in past his barriers.

He flicked a glance around her face, reading her, his own face held deliberately inexpressive. She knew him too well for her own comfort at times.

"What's that," he said, nodding at her dish. His way of giving in. An inch's worth.

"Cobbler." She turned it in her hands. "Apple."

"Laura make that?"

"No," she said, mildly stung, voice tart. "I did, thank you." Granted, it had been her sister's recipe, and kitchen, and backyard apples, and she might have accidentally left out the salt, but it was edible. Good even. It smelled good, anyhow. Ungracious man.

He seemed to be on the verge, finally, of asking her in, but she jumped ahead first: "Well, are you going to invite me in?"

"Come in," he said with heavy irony, meeting her eyes with a knowing and somehow warning look, then drawing the door open wide.

She stepped inside, keenly sweeping the loft with her gaze, noting the changes. It had been three years since she'd been here last, and those few brief visits after she'd moved out had not left her with a strong residual image of the space. She remembered it with her furniture, remembered it more vaguely as being empty and dusty after her departure. She didn't remember it like this.

"The place looks nice," she said. She let him take the casserole dish from her hands, adjusted her purse strap, continued to look around, finding things she didn't recognize; a bookshelf, an afghan, masks and pictures on the walls. Blair's things, she assumed. But there were also items that reflected the personality of Jim, a man for whom IKEA had been made, who in his tidy way actually seemed to _like_ Roder lamps and Karlanda chairs, each of which had spawned here in his living room.

"Somehow when I left I thought this place would get more--" She searched for a word, hand plucking the air. Jim, standing against a post with his arms folded, head cocked, didn't help her out. "Bachelor like," she finished, more waspishly than she'd intended.

"Yeah," he said. It was the definitive Jim punctuation to all her remarks, one that could range from assent to skepticism to derision. Yeah, I heard you. Yeah, I'm pretending to agree so I don't have to give you a real answer. Yeah, no comment.

She folded her arms in return, growing tense, trying to remember how they had ever managed to remain married for a year. A year, three months, one week, five days. She was searching for the next bright thing to say when there was the sound of a door opening on a toilet's dwindling flush and Blair Sandburg came around the corner from the bathroom. Tension gathered up a fine knot in her stomach. The last time she'd seen him had been at his swan song of a press conference, via local news coverage on a videotape her sister had sent. He'd looked tired then, older. Now he looked even more worn and roughly used. He had sharply delineated scars on his face, and his eyes were nearly as hard to read as Jim's. She'd remembered him as buoyant, quick to flash a smile. Now his entire bearing conveyed reticence.

"Hi, Carolyn." His voice was subdued.

"Hello, Blair."

Jim pushed off from his post and stepped into the kitchen, half blocking her view of him. "You want something," he asked, not facing her, asking over his shoulder. "Tea. Water. Coffee." She heard him murmur something else to Blair but couldn't make out the words.

"Coffee. But if you don't have any made--" She walked over and leaned against the counter in a casual way, but Jim was ignoring her, getting mugs down from the cupboard. She was merely a guest to him. It made her slightly angry. She took off her purse and set it down, realizing after she did that she'd placed it precisely where she always used to place it when she came home.

She and Blair stood at opposite ends of the kitchen, awkwardly, while Jim made coffee with a practiced, domestic air she didn't recognize. He was grinding coffee beans, for crying out loud. Under different circumstances, she would have commented on this, tweaked him. She took the opportunity instead to study Blair, the slim frame of his body under his loose clothes, the clothes themselves, which were sloppy, lazy weekend wear, and. . .Jim's. A red plaid shirt he'd owned before their marriage, a pair of size-tall CPD sweats that bunched around the ankles.

Bachelors, she thought. They never do laundry. Except, she'd used to wear Jim's shirt like that. And it was strange to think men might share their clothes.

"So, you're here for a visit," Blair said. His voice rose barely enough to make it a question.

Carolyn shifted. "Well, now, yes. But I'm taking a position with the department again. I'll be the assistant supervisor of the CAU."

"Wow. That's great. Congratulations."

He might have been sympathizing about her dog's death for all the enthusiasm his words carried, but she smiled regardless.

"Thanks. I'm looking forward to it."

The coffee began percolating then, and Jim turned and spoke to Blair. "Sorry. I was going to to mention that. I just found out yesterday when I ran into Carolyn. It slipped my mind."

Blair shrugged. "Slip happens."

Within ten minutes they were sitting around the living room, and Carolyn was sipping her coffee and trying not to connect the dots out of the swirl of details in the room; the bowl of ripe apples on the table, the brightly embroidered pillow by her hip, Jim's shirt on Blair.

"This is good, Carolyn," Blair said politely, turning over a hunk of cobbler with his fork and then taking another taste. She sensed he hadn't been eating much, his cheekbones too sharp, and she wondered again how extensive his injuries were. What they were, exactly.

"Simon told me about the trip you all took," she said, stroking her skirt over her knees, wishing she were more comfortable with the two of them. Once, not long after Blair started hanging around the station, they'd all gone out for drinks. She tried to feel as she had then, when she'd believed that a smart, professional woman naturally has the upper hand with men who could use a little polishing.

"I'm sorry to hear about what happened," she went on. "Not that he told me much. Just that it was. . .pretty rough." She was quoting his meaningless words. When no reply was forthcoming she looked up, glancing between them. Jim was perched on the edge of his seat, hands loosely clasped in front of him, staring at the apples. Blair poked at his cobbler, eyes downcast.

"Rough, yes," Jim said after a minute, when the silence needed to be filled.

"So, what did happen?" Carolyn asked with directness.

"I'd rather not talk about it."

Of course not, she thought, resigned. No matter how much time passed and how estranged they became, Jim would always feel like family to her because, like family, he never deviated from the same tired script.

"I wasn't asking just you, Jim," she said, chiding as gently as she knew how before turning her gaze to Blair.

"Oh," said Blair. "Thanks, but. . .um. I don't really want to talk about it, either."

"Right," said Carolyn, sighing and shoving a bit of hair back from her face.

"It's kind of. . .a lot to process." Blair toyed with his fork. Clink, clink, clink. "But you know, we'd like to hear about your plans. When you're coming back, when the job starts. It must be pretty exciting. CAU. You'll be working with Samantha, Francis, Peter. Well, not working with them. I guess you'll be top dog. Assistant dog." Clink, clink, clink. "That's a big leap up the ladder. I mean, I'm just guessing. I never knew what kind of work you were doing in San Fran. The gist, of course, but not the details. But I'm not surprised you're moving up. You were always right on top of things. It was hard to pry anything loose from Tech after you left." Clink, clink, clink.

For a brief moment Carolyn felt a motherly impulse to take his bowl away and stifle his nervous tic. With his legs crossed and his hair hanging down around his face he looked like a teenager forced to be sociable. But before she could interrupt his uneasy fidgeting or small talk, Jim got up and sat down next to him; he slid an arm across the back of the couch behind Blair and took the bowl from him, setting it in his lap before forking up some cobbler for himself awkwardly with his left hand. She watched in amazement. That answered that question--begged and answered it in the same breath, actually.

Conversation proceeded in a stilted fashion for the remainder of her visit. She found it difficult to concentrate with Jim sitting across from her, her ex-husband, with his arm nearly around another man, and so obviously trying to be casual, while forcing her with his eyes not to ask any more questions. Only after she left and had the opportunity to sift through her impressions did it occur to her how much of that deterrence might have been for Blair's sake, and not a defense against her. She felt manipulated, nonetheless, and confused and bereft. It made her doubt all her recent choices, and as she drove slowly through Cascade to her sister's house she cried to herself in the softest possible way, without an audience but with the luxury of indulgence. The job was what she wanted, but she'd also thought she was coming home to a familiar place, to the people she knew best in the world.

But if she didn't know Jim, that most predictable of men, maybe she didn't know anything at all, or anyone.

*****

"That was. . .fun," Blair said after Jim closed the door behind Carolyn.

Jim turned from the door, aggravation simmering to the surface. "I can't believe Simon told her and didn't let me know."

"Maybe it slipped his mind."

A look of mild, ironical resignation was turned Blair's way. "Point taken."

"He probably meant to let you know on Monday." He rose and carried his half-eaten cobbler to the kitchen. "And it didn't seem like he'd shared a lot of details." He heard Jim grunt in his subtle way.

They returned to their pastimes. Blair had the impression Jim wanted to ask if he were all right, but was holding back. He was glad of Jim's restraint.

The day softened and the shadows lengthened.

Dinner was made, TV was watched, conversation was had. The activities swept him gently through the evening, over the surface of life. That night they slept. Sunday followed in the same way, unremarkable, but threaded with the deep strains of waiting for another week to begin, for the solitude he both welcomed and feared. And it was six weeks to the day.

He meditated and wrote in his journal, feeling small and cold and dark. It was Halloween, and Jim made an emergency run to the store for candy, but they only had two visitors to the loft, young relatives of other tenants, both shepherded by uncomfortably smiling adults who might have been questioning how well the holiday tradition transplanted itself to the city. The full bowl of candy sat on the table by the door, and it made Blair anxious, waiting for knocks that didn't come.

Late Sunday evening, he went to run his bath, lit the candles and incense as he usually did, and stripped. By candlelight he stood staring at himself in the mirror that hung on the back of the bathroom door. The word carved on his chest was compelling; he traced it with his fingertips, then fingered his other scars. He felt frozen inside, bemused.

Recognizing yet again how little his reflection told him, he went and sat in the bath's hot water, careful not to splash the candles that lined the edge. He soaped himself slowly, dragging the big coarse sponge across his skin. After a while he chanted; the sounds rose naturally in his throat. Once he would have felt silly doing this and worried about Jim hearing him. Considerations like that meant less to him now. The sounds he made felt good, moans drawn from an empty flute to bounce off the tiles and the water and his body until he resonated with their power.

Not much power. Not yet. But rising.

*****

Monday morning Jim went off to court in his dark blue suit, the one that made him look like an investment banker, and Blair stayed home, wearing the clothes Jim had tossed in the laundry basket. It was a long day, and he slept in, swimming the blue seas of Jim's big bed, before rising at noon to get through hours of quiet. There was nothing he wanted to do on Monday, and he managed to accomplish nothing with great determination.

Tuesday and Wednesday, Blair did something--he must have, he'd been breathing--but by the end of Wednesday, he couldn't recall exactly what.

On Thursday morning, Jim stayed home from work and drove him to the clinic for his HIV test. The clinic was only six blocks away, located in the plain brick building of the Gay and Lesbian Community Center, on the edge of the waterfront district.

Jim stayed close by his side as they went in, arm laid across his shoulders. Blair could sense his buried fear, little different than his own, but he was making a gallant show of supportiveness and calm. There was something touching, too, about how he looked around the interior lobby of the center, eyeing the theater posters and the hand-made quilt that hung on its walls as if trying to appreciate a culture he was nominally a member of now.

"It's on the third floor," Blair said.

They rode up in the elevator and found the clinic's offices. The waiting room looked like any other waiting room. Ordinary, overly bright, stifling. The receptionist gave him forms to fill out, coded for anonymity. He sat down in one of the vinyl chairs, Jim wedged in next to him, and scratched his information in the forms with a dying ballpoint and a shaky hand. Two men sitting across from them, obviously strangers to one another, had struck up a conversation and were flirting with light drawls.

He bent his head and tried to focus on the questions ( _check any that apply: rashes, fever, tiredness_ ) and was startled when Jim touched the back of his neck gently. He crooked up a glance, but Jim simply radiated companionship, no words.

A short time after he handed in his clipboard, a nurse appeared at the door and called him. He left Jim behind and followed. The nurse weighed him and then led him to an examination room, where he was joined minutes later by a doctor who introduced herself as Linda Carr. She looked over his forms and asked additional questions in a voice carefully gentled, as if she was used to soothing skittish patients. The dying.

Blair clutched his knees tightly as the doctor asked whether he was a hemophiliac, about the number of sexual partners he'd had in the previous year, their genders, what kinds of sexual practices he engaged in, whether he always used a condom. He told her he'd had sex with six women in that year, three men, and that he'd used a condom with all the women for vaginal intercourse. The more he said, the more he didn't say. He had counted the rapists among the three men. He sensed her honing in on his evasions and equivocations.

When she asked if he'd recently had unprotected anal sex, he answered yes. His face heated and he felt ashamed, as if he'd been careless, responsible for putting himself at risk.

"Were you the receptive partner?" she asked.

"Yes."

"Could you tell me what happened--was this was unplanned?"

"Yes," Blair said, staring at her left knee.

"Were you using drugs or alcohol?"

"I was raped," he said. He told her the rest, with minimal detail. She didn't write anything down as he spoke. After that, the remainder of her questions were painless and perfunctory. She understood why he was here.

The doctor took his blood personally, talking most of the time. "We're going to be performing a rapid HIV test, what you may have heard called a Murex or SUDS. We should have the results in about fifteen minutes, then we can take a look at it together. During the interval a counseling session is performed, usually geared toward risk reduction. I'd still like to take that time and talk with you. There are a few things we should discuss about the testing itself, and I'll also be glad to answer any questions you might have, whatever the subject." She paused, removed the needle. "I can provide you with some information about opportunities for rape counseling that might be worth looking at."

Blair allowed himself to be eased into the counseling session after Carr delivered his sample for testing. It was moderately excruciating, but he filled the time by asking questions about safe sex and HIV transmission, wanting to make sure that Jim was not at risk. When she left her office to get the test results, he walked over and stared out her window across the bay. He could see one of the big transport ships moored alongside the grain terminal, a weak sister to Seattle's booming terminal, but busy enough. He'd once been prone to wander the docks and railway tracks, just to see what was there, to watch the men working. Twelve, thirteen years old. Old enough to have a dim understanding of the world's risks, too young to feel any real sense of danger.

"Well," Doctor Carr said, returning. "Good news. Your results are negative."

He listened to all the rest she had to say, nodding in a daze, then went back out to Jim, who looked up from a magazine as he entered, and then stood. Jim looked vulnerable to him at that moment, and Blair gave him what he hoped was a reassuring smile.

"How'd it go?" Jim asked in a low voice. There were new people in the waiting room now, but Blair stumbled forward against Jim and clung to him, breathing raggedly.

"Blair, Blair." Jim's voice was a whisper of panic, his hands grabby, painfully strong.  
   
"Negative," Blair whispered back, feathering the word across the ridge of Jim's collarbone.

Jim said nothing but engulfed him until Blair imagined his bones were creaking at the pressure, and then helped him pick up the pamphlets he'd dropped. They left hip-to-hip, nearly entwined in relief.

"The doctor said I should get tested again after two more months or so. At six months too." He butted up against Jim again as they waited for the elevator. "She said I might want to get, um, confirmatory tests. They send them out for that."

"We can do that." Jim smiled, cupped the back of his head, hand resting above the root of his pony-tail. "You'll be okay, Chief." He said this now as if he knew for sure.

Blair moved his arm, feeling the light pull of the band-aid, and nodded.

*****

Jim took him out for a celebratory lunch in a nearby organic deli, where they stood in line for their orders and endured the friendly banter that Violet liked to bestow on customers of long standing, then took their lunches to one of the small tables outside. It was just cold enough to nip, but a few others sat under the awning. Blair made himself eat half a sandwich and three bites of kosher dill. He noticed that despite Jim's earlier assurance, he still wore a crease of worry between his brows. Blair wondered if it would be there for the next six months. Jim probably wasn't going to stand down until they were out of the danger zone.

"Hey, Jim," he said, and earned Jim's immediate attention, drawn from the cheap colored menu he'd been reading and trained on him as if anything he said would be wisdom, church bells, the treat of a fortune cookie. "I just wanted to see, you know, how things were going." He lowered his voice. "With your senses."

Jim shrugged, wiped his mouth with a napkin. "Pretty much as always."

"Any headaches?" This week, he meant.

"Nope," Jim said, after pretending to think about it.

He was lying, but Blair let it go. "You zone at all?" This time, briefly but clearly, he could see Jim considering how best to answer, what would be believed if not absolutely truthful.

"Not really. A few times, for a few moments. Nothing unusual."

Blair stared off down the sunny street. A snow-white pigeon looked back at him, cocking its head. I'm failing Jim, he told the pigeon silently. A lot depends on me. A lot depends on him. I need to get myself in gear.

He would already be well on his way, if he only knew how.

*****

When they reached the loft, Blair made Jim go to work. Alone, he paced. He'd spent weeks lying around. In his most generous moments, he'd reassured himself he was simply healing from the attack at the cabin; at his most churlish, he'd sneered at himself, loathing his lassitude. Some days he'd had a sudden upswing into jittery nerves, for no reason he could name. Except for the obvious.

Today was one of those days.

"Break through," he muttered, walking in a broad, erratic circle around the living room. "Break through," he commanded himself. "Shit, shit, shit." He was desperate to do something, because something needed to be done, something of moment. He picked up the phone, held it to his chest. "Call," he said, visualizing Naomi. "Call me," he whispered. "Call. Call. Call." His chant diverted him. He sounded like a crow. He remembered the white pigeon on the street, thought about carrier pigeons and messages. There weren't carrier crows, he was fairly sure. Even so, a crow might be a good messenger; dark but spiritual, one that Naomi should be receptive to.

"Caw," he said aloud, testing out the sound. For a second he teetered on the edge between old self and new, between self-consciousness and need. Then slipped over.

He let go and circled the room with arms outspread, phone in hand, a dead object into which he would channel his sympathetic magic. He was the crow. He would be Crow. And Crow would be his messenger.

*****

Friday morning, Jim left for work in time to arrive by eight. He could have come in at nine, ten; few cared these days when he got there. But he'd needed to get out of the loft, drive down to the station in the crisp early sunshine. He stopped at a conveniently situated Starbucks on the way, thought _conscious coffee_ in Blair's mildly rebuking voice, but felt no guilt.

Blair had been wound up when Jim came home the previous night; sitting at the table, static but muscles bunched, laptop out, stacks of paper and books around him. Dinner had been half assembled on the kitchen counter, forgotten. He'd been bookmarking webpages, making lists of herbal plants he wanted to order; herbs and more books. Jim, cheered by these signs of activity, had handed over his AmEx without a murmur, resolving at that moment to order Blair his own card.

Cheer had wavered as the evening passed, as Blair talked and Jim began to understand his intentions more clearly. The plants that interested him might not have been on the controlled substances list, but they weren't slated for the chopping block and chicken soup. It was the kind of stuff you smoked--or, Blair claimed, made into tea--for visionary dreams. Jim had misgivings, had been a bit irritated, even. Hadn't they tabled this conversation?

"It's not the same thing, Jim," Blair had said. " _You_ could drink this stuff. Calea Zacatechichi, for example--it's supposed to clarify the senses, make your dreams more meaningful."

"My senses don't need clarifying, thanks," Jim had replied, but he'd let the issue drop, bribed to surrender by that casual "for example," a pedantic relapse that recalled happier times. The table remained littered with lists while they ate dinner. The book titles, read sidelong and flattened, all appeared to be about shamanism. No surprise. But he didn't care what the books were about; he simply wanted to see a sharp gleam of purpose back in Blair's eyes. He wasn't confident the younger man's energized phase would last long, but every upswing sustained hope.

There had been a feather taped to the cordless phone. He hadn't asked, but Blair explained anyway, something about crows and Naomi. And Jim had nodded, hummed with a show of interest, accepting. There'd been no calls. They'd tried to watch "Must See TV" and ended up playing Scrabble instead. Jim had glimpsed himself down the road at age fifty, sixty, and been oddly content.

Later they'd made love, rubbing the way Chopec made fire. There would be no nightmares for Blair that night, Jim had been sure. There had been, though, and now he was short of sleep and tired.

He reached the station and spent a short while catching up with paperwork that had taken a backseat to his court appearance. He hadn't even made it to his e-mail when Rafe came over to his desk. "Call just came in. You're up on rotation." Rafe's face was a hard shield, as if primed for Jim's resistance. "Since H's out, Cooper suggested we work it together."

"Cooper," said Jim, bemused. It was the shift sergeant's right to make assignments, and rotation was rotation, but he couldn't remember the last time he'd been partnered up with anyone. Since Blair's departure, he'd worked most cases alone, taking fewer because of it, but figuring he might as well live up to his refurbished lone ranger rep for as long as the brass would let him.

"If you're not too busy." There was a slight touch of sarcasm to Rafe's edgy voice. Jim flicked a glance up at the younger man, respecting the jab. It was meant to recall him to the concept of teamwork, and it did. He conceded with as much good grace as he could manage these days.

"Nope. I'm up." Jim matched his pledge by standing and grabbing his coat. "What's the call?" he asked as he fell into stride next to Rafe.

"Rape."

Jim's mouth tightened.

Simon filled the doorway of his office as they were passing, arms outstretched to the frame. If not for the tension in his shoulders and the heaviness to his face, it could have been any day of a thousand plucked from the past.  "Where you fellows off to?"

They paused. "Got a call," said Rafe. "Down on Second and La Salle."

The captain raised his brows minutely, eyeing them. "You two working it together?"

"So it would seem," Jim said. He tried to lighten the grim note he'd struck. "Apparently there's this thing called rotation."

"I've heard of that," said Simon. "Cooper call you up?"

"Yep."

"Man's got balls of steel." He dismissed them with a wave and Rafe and Jim walked on.

"Don't know why we don't have our own shift sergeant," Rafe griped while they waited for the elevator. "Trying to pry Coop's attention away from homicide is like trying to get kisses from a nun."

Jim ignored the disgruntlement and its underlying message, which was that someone like himself would have to pull more weight and play by the book if they had their own direct supervisory staff. It was not a new complaint, and only friendship softened its edge.

"You wouldn't be so happy once you had someone breathing down your neck every minute," he said mildly. "Someone with the time to actually read your reports rather than rubber-stamp them."

"Yeah, I suppose."

They didn't talk much on their way to the scene, until they were pulling onto First.

"You want primary?" Rafe said. It was impossible to tell from his tone whether the offer was genuine or grudging.

"I don't care."

"Me either."

"If you want the hours. . . ."

"Doesn't matter."

"I don't need the hours," Jim said, staring out the window.

"Fine."

This section of First had been renovated during the last decade, a far cry from the shelters and shabby taverns ten blocks further down. Trees lined the street and the red-bricked factories had been converted into condos with painted shutters and brass nameplates, with names like Dorcas Place and The Windemere. Their destination was Park Place, but there was no park, just a tan brick building of six stories, with shiny black railings jutting out from either side of its front face and disappearing around its perimeter. A two-foot wide border of cramped flowers and tiny shrubs flanked the entrance.

Along the street were parked two radio cars, both chugging exhaust, their lights off. A uniform leaned against one car, clipboard tucked against his belly, writing into his log report.

Rafe pulled the car into a tow zone and hooked a city permit on the rear-view mirror. The uniform squinted their way and straightened up, but relaxed his posture as Rafe and Jim got out of the car, recognizing their authority by instinct, if not by the badges and radio mikes clipped at their belts. He was young, maybe Blair's age, but short-haired and narrow-faced.

"How goes it," said Rafe.

"Fine, sir."

"You the first officer?"

"Me and Drummond. I'm Bailey." He cleared his throat. "Carey Bailey."

They passed around short introductions. "Who else is upstairs?" asked Jim.

"Uh, Rutherford. We're on the edge of his district."

Jim exchanged a look with Rafe, who shared his grimace. Rutherford rode alone these days; he was a veteran of the streets, but a cranky bastard who disliked detectives almost as much as he did criminals. And civilians. And dogs.

"Victim's not still up there, is she?" Rafe was jotting names in his notebook, Jim saw.

"No. Medics took her over to Crittenden. Roommate's up there. He called it in."

"He? Boyfriend?" Rafe tucked his notebook away, more interested in listening now. Jim found himself watching the younger man. He hadn't worked with Rafe in a while, had forgotten his easy competency.

"Hardly. Queer as a three-dollar bill." Bailey was watchful as he said this, as any cop was these days, when you could count half the time on a politically correct reprimand and the other half on sympathy.

Rafe chose to ignore the comment, but seemed to decide that he'd get the rest of his information from Drummond. He thanked Bailey cursorily, grabbed a field kit from the trunk of the car, and headed inside. Jim followed at a slower pace, senses turned up and tingling. He hadn't turned them up himself; they often went on alert involuntarily as he neared any crime scene, as if attempting to synchronize with his observational readiness. He hoped in a glum, resigned way that he could get through this without zoning.

His senses zinged more strongly as they rose in the elevator, and as they exited onto the fourth floor he felt a familiar, sickening wave of scent and sound wash over him: coffee, cologne, the babble of voices, the creak of bodies and floorboards, cigarette smoke, the subdued roar of air vents, air freshener, sweat. Heat flared across his skin, cascading from his scalp to his feet in the space of a few seconds, and every color in the hallway suddenly swelled with a sharp new level of saturation. His tongue, coated with ghostly layers of scent, became a nauseating presence in his mouth.

"It's four-oh-two," Rafe said, walking down the hall to knock at the plain white door, behind which lay the main source of turmoil Jim was experiencing now.

Dave Rutherford opened the door a guarded foot, then let it swing wider as he identified them. He was a tall, heavy man with a close-shaven grey head and a face that looked as if it should have worn a mustache but didn't. The natural heft of his body was exacerbated by the weight of his gear; baton, belt, and vest gave him the lumbering swank that so many uniforms relished.

"Detectives," he said in an unwelcoming voice. "I was wondering when you'd arrive."

He smelled powerfully of cigarettes, so much so that Jim nearly gagged when he brushed past. It was not just his clothes; Rutherford's exhalations carried a particular deep tinge Jim had come to associate with people developing lung cancer. He wondered what the man would say if he shared that insight.

Jim looked around the apartment, taking in the decor. Outside, the building had retained a touch of its old character, but its interior had apparently been converted into the sort of bland, chi-chi condos that up-and-coming yuppies flocked to, with thin, pale floorboards, and ceiling fans. The kitchen was visible through an open peninsula, lined with mullioned cabinets. Its small counters were crowded with appliances, and someone had recently brewed coffee that gave off the scent of imitation vanilla.

He traced that same scent to a coffee mug being held by a thirtyish man with short, tightly curled blond hair, sitting on a couch. The roommate, presumably. He wore a striped oxford shirt tucked into khaki trousers; both were infused with a blend of harsh odors: bar smoke, alcohol-enhanced sweat, cologne, sex. Jim wrinkled his nose and guessed that the man had been club-hopping, hooked up, and come home only this morning, which fit with the report so far.

The third uniform, Ginnie Drummond, perched on a chair near the roommate, a coffee mug on the table in front of her, only lightly sipped from. She appeared relieved by their arrival, and stood up right away.  
   
"Hi, Ginnie," said Rafe. Jim echoed the greeting.

She ambled over with her own hellos, and the four cops clustered briefly by the door.

"This your party, Ellison?" asked Rutherford.

"Rafe's primary." Politely, Jim looked for direction from Rafe, who snapped off a confident order to Rutherford to stay tight with the roommate while they got their brief from Drummond. They went back outside into the hallway, and let Drummond run down the details.

"Victim's name is Kimberly Wax. Roommate's Joey Culley. That's the guy you just saw. He came home this morning at approximately eight-thirty, which he rememebers 'cause he was running late for work. He comes in the front door, sees Wax's purse on the table, her coat on the chair, knows she hasn't left. He's worried right off the bat, 'cause her shift starts at eight and he says she don't miss work much. He goes to her door and knocks, thinking she might be sick, and he hears this sound like a little cry, but kind of muffled, and he opens the door to see this guy climbing out the window. He says he run across the room, yelling, but the guy is going down the fire escape and he's not inclined to chase him, which is wise."

She flipped a page of notes. "He calls nine-one-one from the phone by Wax's bed. She's there, naked, cut up, scared out of her wits. Sounds like he was with her most of the night--the perp. When we got here, she was still in bed, blanket over her. Culley was in there looking after her, and he pulled the blankets up, touched the kleenex box, knelt by the bed. Doesn't look like she had time to wash up. Culley says she didn't, anyway. We got him outta the room. Medics took her out from there. Tough time of it. You see that tiny elevator? Don't know how they get furniture up in these places."

"How bad was she cut?" Rafe asked. Jim heard a tremor in his voice, so slight that no one but a sentinel would have caught it.

"I checked her out when I came in. Sliced up one breast to the shoulder, down one side of her belly. Looked pretty bad. Lotta bruising too, and he musta gave her a clout to the head. Bed's a mess," she added.

They questioned her for several minutes, taking stock of the situation, before letting her return to the apartment. Remaining outside, they formalized their plan of attack.

"I'll question this guy Culley," Rafe said. "You call in the techs and take a look over the girl's room before they get here. I'm ready to cut Rutherford loose, keep the others on the doors."

"We might stake Bailey in the alley," Jim suggested, careful not to push himself too hard into the other man's territory. "We'll be needing to check it out."

"Yeah, good idea," said Rafe. "I guess we should put Drummond by the elevator on this floor, make sure none of the neighbors leave before we can question them."

"Already gone for the day," Jim said aloud, before thinking. He cursed inwardly at Rafe's sharp gaze. "Probably," he added with a casual shrug of one shoulder. "The kind of people who'd live here work long hours."

Rafe looked as if he had a lot he wanted to say, but didn't speak. They returned inside and Jim called the lab, then went to stand in the doorway of Kimberly Wax's room, leaving Rafe to detail the patrol officers.

He inhaled surreptitiously and played his gaze over the floor. Most of it was covered by an inexpensive rug in a pink-and-white pattern not unlike a quilt. He stepped carefully inside, pulling on a pair of thin rubber gloves. He didn't look at the bed, didn't think he could take that just yet. He could smell the blood there, where it had soaked into the sheets and dried, could smell semen and fear. Detachment wavered as some huge terrible wave of feeling rolled through his mind, but he blinked and surfaced and breathed.

Other smells assaulted his nose. Wax kept sachets of cheap potpourri in her dresser drawers, used Head and Shoulders shampoo, had burned coconut candles sometime in the last few days.

He circled the perimeter of the room until he reached the open window. He eyed this critically, regretting the modern fittings. Wooden window frames, the kind with rough edges and peeling paint, were great for catching strands of hair; the frames in this apartment were metal. He did find one strand, snagged in the rubber insulation strip along the bottom, then discovered another on the curtains. He left them where they were, for the techs to gather, but placed an evidence marker nearby, elaborated with a sticky note.

Going over the floor and carpet by the window, he tried to decide if the perp had come in that way. No reason to think so. He might have been waiting for her outside the building, or even inside it. There had been twenty-four mailboxes in the lobby. The perp could have managed to get himself buzzed in, or might be known to one of the residents. Jim made a mental note to check on pizza deliveries the previous night, to ask about parties. A Tuesday night, in a sedate building. . .still, maybe there'd been some action.

He found granules in the carpet. Beach sand. But then, attuned, he spotted them everywhere in the room and traced them to the closet as well, where a pair of salty sneakers resided.

Unable to avoid it any longer, he went to the bed and scoured it with his vision. Blood spotted and striped the pale green sheets. He focused deeply, despite his best intentions, zeroing in on the weave of the fabric, vision and scent working in synergy to illuminate its secrets. Among the blood was a spray of semen, a pubic hair. His senses overflowed. He smelled the presence of the used condom caught in a blanket's fold, the tear-stains on the pillow case. There were dark smudges of dirt somewhere in the heap of fabric, mud from the perp's shoes. The bed was an evidentiary field day, and in the distant reaches of his mind, Jim was glad, but he was rolling on, down deeper, toward the comprehension of more. A vision of the violence that had been acted out here. He could almost understand the pattern of the struggle from the elements, and he took a deep breath and another and felt them drawing together, cohering like sense from an ink blot, and he heard voices. . . .

"Jim, Jesus, come on," said Rafe anxiously, pushing at his shoulder.

Drawn from his zone with a discordant wrench, his nerves an electric guitar being smashed and unstrung, Jim blinked and looked at the other man with reluctance.

"Culley went to the kitchen and saw you standing here," Rafe said, hisses darting through his low voice. "You were just--" He yanked his hand away and ran it through his hair. "Standing here."

"Found some hairs on the window," Jim said roughly, cheeks hot with the familiar shame of his situation, closer to anger. He felt unwell. A headache stabbed at him, and his stomach churned. He looked away and stared at the bed again, in no danger of zoning now. "There's pubic hair in the bed, semen, a used condom, mud stains." He rattled them off. "And Wax was having her period."

"Christ," said Rafe, turning to stare at the bed, obviously trying to see what Jim saw. "Christ," he repeated.

Weariness edged its way through Jim. For a minute he thought about putting Rafe in the picture once and for all, then remembered him asking, _when are you going to start wearing tights and a cape?_ It wasn't that, though, if he were honest with himself. It wasn't the fear of jokes or whispers that inhibited him anymore, but how wrong it was;  how wrong to have let Blair lie for him and to have loved him all the more for it, and to have understood, in a slow and painful way, only months later, that the younger man had flushed his life down the toilet, and that he, Jim Ellison, was now trapped in that lie. At a time when he was ready to say to hell with all closets, he couldn't find his way free of this one. If he admitted everything, what would they think of him, a man who'd let his friend destroy his credibility and career for the sake of that secret.

"I'm going to check on the neighbors," Jim said. "Might try the floor above and below too."

That questioning didn't take long. Few residents were home at this time of day, and the few who were had seen and heard nothing. He took down names, handed out business cards. By the time he returned, the lab techs had arrived and were floating around like ghosts in their white Tvyek coveralls. One was dusting various surfaces for prints, another bundling up the sheets on Wax's bed.

"I guess she won't want that back," Culley said, watching from the living room as the tech carefully rolled the bedding. He raised a hand to his mouth and laughed in a pained way. "Her mother gave those sheets to her. But who would want them back, after. . . ." He waved a hand with grace and drama, a gesture that seemed half innate, half cultivated.

"I've called the hospital," Rafe said, after drawing Jim away to one side of the room. "Wax is conscious. I want to get down there right away."

"Are you going to the hospital?" Culley asked, overhearing. He was hugging himself, hands massaging his elbows in a nervous way. "Can I ride with you?"

"It would be better if you stayed here, sir," said Rafe. "We need someone in the apartment right now."

Jim snuffed out the beginning of a thin smile. It was terrible, given the circumstances, but Culley was clearly a bit taken with Rafe.

"Oh, but I trust them." Culley waved his hand again dismissively in the direction of Wax's bedroom. "And I should be with Kim. I should take her some things."

Rafe hesitated, then grudgingly said, "Yeah, that's probably a good idea."

They took Culley's prints for elimination purposes before letting him do anything else, and a short while later they were gathered on the sidewalk in front of the building. Rafe was conferring with Bailey through the fence; Culley, overnight bag slung on his shoulder, was stealing a smoke and contemplating his smudged fingertips; while Jim slouched nearby with hands in his pockets, thinking of Blair.

"Your partner's quite a hottie, isn't he?" said Culley.

Jim started, wonderment flaring through him before he realized that Culley meant Rafe. "Oh, yes," he said smoothly. "A real hottie."

Culley dropped his cigarette on the ground, mashed it with his foot, then appeared to scrutinize Jim's ankles. "My type?"

Jim turned the question around and shook his head. "Sorry."

Culley shrugged.

Rafe rejoined them. Jim was tempted to tell Rafe that he was a real hottie, but bit his tongue and simply gave the two men a little salute as they climbed into the car and headed for the hospital, leaving him standing on the sidewalk. It was chilly outside, but the sharp breeze was a relief to his abraded senses, even though it carried the noise and acrid scents of the city. He went next door to a small cafe that he'd seen and ordered a cappuccino; he thought about bringing some back for the techs, then dismissed the impulse. He wasn't in the mood for professional bonding today, not up to the effort.

The Asian woman behind the counter had a face like a heavy dumpling and made his coffee with a high degree of seriousness. He noticed her noticing his badge, and as he paid, asked, "Have you seen anyone odd hanging around here in the last week or so? Anyone new?"

She seemed fazed by the question, confused. "Eh? New?"

"Anyone out of place," he said, speaking more slowly. "Someone who just hangs around in front, maybe watching the building next door."

Several more questions elicited that she'd seen nothing. Par for the course.

Outside, the nearest tree, nearly empty of leaves, rattled in the wind. Jim decided he liked the trees on this street, even stripped of life; wondered if Blair would want to live in a neighborhood like this, or maybe up near Mercy Park, the kind of place where you could still find big houses that took up a quarter block, with two-car garages and porches and bricked walks. Significant garden plots could be had there, and Jim imagined Blair in blue jeans and maybe a baseball cap, planting herbs in the backyard, some for the shaman, some for the soup.

Definitely better near Mercy Park, he decided. More evergreens. But fewer coffee shops.

When he returned to the apartment, the techs were still at work. He returned to inspecting the premises, trying to figure out the point of entry and knowing that his methodical work could be rendered pointless by a few short sentences from the victim. _He came in with me_. _I had to let him in; he had a knife_.

"Anything else you want us to look for?" asked one of the techs. Merriman--Susan, Sue. He'd worked with her before, but not often. Merriman was new to the lab; the other tech, Baxter, a transplant from night shift.

Jim settled down on one knee and looked over the collection of evidence bags, which the techs had labeled and stacked in a squared-off area of floor by the front door. He asked her to give him a minute, then mentally ticked off the contents of the bags against the rooms. They'd collected exactly the evidence that Rafe had requested, no more. Bedding, a vacuum of the bedroom, trash from the bathroom, prints gathered from various places around the apartment. He smelled used tampons through the double-bagged sack of bathroom garbage, grimaced, and removed himself to several feet away before burying his face in his cappuccino.

He flicked through the print cards next. Bathroom mirror, toilet-seat lid, assorted doorknobs, bedroom window, bedside table. There was a stack of Polaroids next to them, quick-and-dirty shots to supplement the more detailed camera work that Baxter was doing.

After tossing these down, Jim wandered into the small kitchen, to stand poised in the center of its sensory glut. "You looked through here?" he asked, knowing they hadn't.

Merriman shook her head. "No." Her face, set off by her hood, was tan, eyes surrounded by careless swathes of pink shadow, which made her appear weepy. She wasn't the weepy sort, though. She stood on the other side of the peninsula, watching him, gloved hands motionless on the counter. This was not someone prone to distribute stray touches around the room, or mar anything important.

Jim donned gloves, then opened the fridge and stared inside. A Subway sandwich lay front and center on the top shelf, unrolled from its paper, a few bites removed. "Dust the fridge handle," he said, "and bag the sandwich. Carefully. Keep it together. We might have bite marks." He glanced at the linoleum in front of the fridge. "There's a scuff from a rubber-soled shoe here. Get a close shot of that, then scrape it." He turned and scanned the counter by the sink, where a drinking glass stood, and it was as if its tracery of prints exploded into whorled clouds that filled his vision. "Do the glass too."

He left Merriman busy, and went into Culley's bedroom, where he examined the soles of all his shoes. One pair he brought back to the kitchen and drew roughly across the tiles at differing angles, but the soles left no mark. Wax's shoes also gave no match.

Not quite an hour later, after having scouted the fire escape and alley and discovered nothing, Jim dismissed the techs and returned to the station, catching a ride in Bailey's patrol car. He had no evidence to admit into lock-up; it would be days before the labwork was done on their haul, but he'd carried off the Polaroids, for what they were worth.

Rafe called him from the hospital, and then swung by the station to pick him up again.

"So she says he was waiting for her when she came home. She'd left work with friends about six-thirty; they went to Fusion, some club over on Cherry. She had a few drinks, thinks it was about eight when she left. Puts some gas in her car on the way back, then goes straight home. She parks her car in the parking garage at the end of the block, comes in the front entrance. She was home for a while, maybe twenty minutes or a half an hour, before he came at her. She says she went to the kitchen and drank some water, then took a shower, and when she came out he was there. Grabs her, throws her on the bed."

"And he was there all night," Jim said. Christ. His mind conjured up a home movie on poor film stock, fading to dark at the edges, blurred and scratchy; Blair coming home one night in just that way, someone waiting for him, a struggle. He felt as if he'd swallowed a stone and it was lodged in his gut.

"Yeah," said Rafe.

If he concentrated, Jim could hear the other man's agitated heartbeat. Rafe's hands were tight on the steering wheel.

"She works for Cascade Cruises. I figured we'd stop by, talk to these people she hit the club with, see if they remember anyone making eyes at her."

"Sounds good," said Jim.

"We'll have to wait till tonight to get anything at Fusion." Rafe paused. "I bet any city you go to, there's a club named Fusion."

"You think?"

"Everything these days is fusion. Fusion music, fusion food."

"Fusion cuisine," Jim said absently.

"Right. Cuisine. Not even food anymore. What's the difference between food and cuisine?"

Jim wondered if this was set-up for a joke. "I don't know."

"Me either. I think it means one half a chicken costs thirty bucks, the other costs five."

Jim's phone rang as they were mired in traffic, a city bus having jumped its wires halfway across the intersection in front of them.

"Ellison."

" _Hey, Jim_."

"Hey--" He almost said _sweetheart_. His tongue curved with want around the word, before he stopped himself, conscious of Rafe listening. "Hey there. What are you up to?"

" _I just wanted to check with you again before I spent, like, a few hundred of your dollars here_."

"Go to town, Chief."

" _Don't you even want to know what I'm getting?_ "

"As long as it's not breathing or a Class A felony." As long as it makes you happy, he thought.

" _Okay, then_. . . _what are you up to?_ "

"New case." He didn't know what to say. Everything about a case he once would have shared so casually with Blair now seemed questionable, tainted. "We're in the thick of it now." He looked out at the traffic around the car, wasn't sure if he were lying.

" _Oh, sorry_. _Well, see you tonight_."

Before Jim could stay him, Blair cut the connection. Had he been angry, or just abrupt without intent, in that recent unpredictable way of his? Hard to tell. He pocketed the phone, suddenly tired again, and wiped the sensation of cobwebs from his face.

"How is he?" asked Rafe. It was what he always asked, and as always Jim felt impatient with the broad, meaningless question. What was there to say. He's fine. He thinks he's the Shaman of the Great City. He's buying wacky herbs and having nightmares and his HIV test just came back negative.

"He's fine," said Jim.

*****

He's fine, thought Jim, coming home late that night to find the furniture pushed against the walls, the smell of burnt sage heavy in the air. He dropped his keys quietly into their bowl. Blair was asleep in the middle of the floor, on his side, breathing softly. The cordless phone lay only inches from his relaxed hand, still taped with a feather. Jim puzzled at its significance again, and that of the phone itself, so close to hand. It was like reading a crime scene: Blair had been worried, on the verge of calling him, and then. . .in this case, he'd merely fallen asleep.

No crime, no crime scene.

Jim slid off his shoes and moved to sit at Blair's side. He stroked the heaped hair, the curve of a shoulder, contemplating whether to wake him up now or later. And then Blair's heartbeat skittered and he was awake and shoving upright.

"Jim."

"Yep." He traced the outline of Blair's face in the semi-dark. The light from the city outside their windows clung to him, grey as dust.

"I dreamed that a man named Vince was bringing me a pizza. . .with grapefruit. And a cat."

"Not on the pizza, I hope."

"No, it was just kind of keeping pace next to his ankles. Weird, man. Kind of scary, actually." Companiably seated knee to knee with Jim, he leaned back first onto one hand, then the other, twisting at the waist to gently pop his vertebrae.

"What are you doing on the floor?"

"Um. Stuff. Meditation and. . .stuff." Blair got up and turned on a lamp, and Jim likewise stood, squinting down the brightness. "New case, huh. Long day. You make a bust?"

"No. We just went through the paces." Jim felt the heaviness of gun and badge at his waist, and the heaviness of difference that now lay between them stronger than ever. He wondered, as he sometimes did, if Blair would have made a good cop.

"You want dinner? Sandwich, soup." Blair waved his hand vaguely toward the kitchen. "I could eat."

They ate, and Jim barely noticed the taste of his food because Blair spent the meal digging at his reserve with the kind of questions he hadn't asked for weeks, questions about the case, about his day. It was as if Blair somehow _knew_ that this would be the very case he didn't want to talk about.

"Assault, huh," Blair said with false neutrality, after Jim had sketched a whitewashed version of the case. "So he just broke in and knocked her around a bit?"

Jim looked up from his soup bowl, met Blair's gaze. "He raped her," he said, matching Blair's neutral tone, but with the familiar grating ache of rage for their circumstances, for the criminality of their fucking world. He watched Blair duck his head in contemplation. A year or two ago the younger man would have expressed outrage and the kind of broad, civilized sympathy typical of liberals, responses Jim had come to accept as meaningful because he knew that behind them lay a readiness to match words with actions. Blair had been the kind of guy who'd spend his free time handing out leaflets with feminists, and not just to get laid; on the surface, a member of the less than virile breed Jim used to mock during his own college days, when he'd been about as enlightened as a twenty-year old plank.

Now it hurt to look at him, as if his own heart beat in Blair's chest.

"Blair--"

"It's okay, Jim. I'm okay."

"More than I would be," Jim said grimly.

Blair cocked his head at him, but heavily, as if he were weighed down with doubt. "I don't want to think about that," he said in dismissal.

They didn't talk about much else, but in bed later, Jim lay on his side and watched Blair pretend to sleep, and tried to imagine their places reversed. He knew himself, and knew he would have taken it poorly, been hell to live with, a bastard, morose and sullen. Maybe even broken.

But it would have been worth it. It would not have been Blair.

*****

**Author's Note:**

> Graphic description of a past rape and torture. Graphic description of a rape and mutilation.


End file.
